Newark Mayor’s Other Role: Big Brother

NEWARK, Oct. 2 — The 17-year-old sat across the table from the mayor, text messaging friends and avoiding eye contact. The stir that Cory A. Booker’s arrival at an Applebee’s restaurant here had provoked — diners posed with him for cellphone portraits, autographs were sought — had calmed.

Mr. Booker moved to get the teenager’s attention. “What’s up with the bandana around your head?” Mr. Booker asked playfully of the young man, Sean Bennett Laboo. “When am I going to see graduation pictures?”

Sean barely mustered a shrug. But when he ignored more pointed questions about his plans, Mr. Booker leaned forward. “Life is about focus,” he said. “What you focus on, you become. If you focus on nothing, you become nothing.”

During his first 15 months as mayor of this beleaguered city, Mr. Booker has taken on a number of major issues — crime, unemployment, economic development. His relationship with Sean has been part of a more private agenda — the role of big brother to three young men from some of the toughest streets.

All three have had brushes with the law. They come from dysfunctional families. They were — and are still — at risk of becoming part of a set of grim and familiar statistics.

But for much of the last year, they have also had the company and support of this city’s top elected official. At City Hall, the three — Sean; Anthony Jackson, 15; and Duwon Diggs, 18 — are collectively known as “the boys.” They occasionally kill time waiting for weekly tutoring lessons by spinning around in Mr. Booker’s desk chair. Sometimes they make prank calls from his phone.

Unless his public schedule gets in the way, the mayor and the boys get together every weekend, usually on Friday nights, when they take in a movie and dinner. The mayor sometimes brings them to lectures or award dinners, and on many nights, they will end up back at City Hall playing the board game Risk until midnight. On Sundays, after he drags them to morning church services, they loll around Mr. Booker’s apartment watching sci-fi movies and playing video games. Members of the mayor’s security team drive the boys to the outings and weekly tutoring sessions. Over time, they have become mentors as well.

When strangers at restaurants or street fairs mistake the adolescents for Mr. Booker’s flesh and blood, the mayor rarely corrects the assumptions. “They’re my brothers from another mother who are like no others,” he will say with a grin.

The year together has been something of a mixed and quixotic one for the boys and for Mr. Booker. Duwon has dropped out of school and largely slipped from Mr. Booker’s orbit. Anthony, a hyperkinetic youth who once had a penchant for shoplifting, has started earning better grades. Sean’s progress has been unsteady, too. He has stayed out of trouble, but in many ways remains unmoored.

Still, in a city where crime, drugs and violence have a way of ensnaring children, the fact that all three teenagers have stayed alive and out of jail is an achievement of some magnitude.

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Mayor Booker took Sean Loboo, left, and Anthony Jackson to a senior center to raffle off turkeys. Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

In some ways, then, the relationship between the mayor and the boys is a metaphor for Mr. Booker’s inaugural year at the helm of a city he is struggling to transform. Despite small signs of progress, the mayor has discovered that undoing the damage from years of governmental neglect and familial dysfunction is not always possible.

While the Booker administration has presided over a 20 percent drop in crime, homicides — 76 this year, compared with 79 for the same period in 2006 — have been largely immune to aggressive police tactics. The mayor has streamlined the municipal bureaucracy to encourage economic development, but unemployment, at 8 percent, remains nearly double the state average.

The city’s stepped-up child immunization program has been cited as among the best in the nation, yet a third of all children still live in poverty.

In August, when three college students were shot to death in a Newark schoolyard and six people, four of them teenagers, were charged with the crime, Mr. Booker made a plea for adults to get involved in the lives of children.

“There’s no reason that programs like Big Brothers and Big Sisters should have dozens of kids waiting for mentors,” he said after the funeral for one of the murdered youths.

The relationship that has grown up between Mr. Booker and Sean, Duwon and Anthony was not born of mutual affection. Shortly after Mr. Booker’s inauguration in July 2006, the police arrested three people for spray-painting the words “Kill Booker” in the hallway of a school none of them attended. This occurred at a time when Mr. Booker and his security detail were grappling with death threats from jailed gang members.

But when he learned that those arrested were under 18, Mr. Booker made prosecutors an unusual proposition. If they would drop the charges, Mr. Booker would become the teenagers’ mentor.

In a city where 5,000 youths wind up in the overburdened criminal justice system each year, Andrea M. Johnson, the assistant prosecutor in Essex County in charge of juvenile cases, thought it was worth a try, at least for Duwon and Sean. (The third youth arrested in the vandalism, a 13-year-old with a record, was considered too far gone for such an intervention.)

But another young man soon joined up. Anthony, a relative of Sean’s, tagged along on one of the first outings with Mr. Booker and was promptly taken into the fold.

“Our only concern was that he might be doing it for publicity purposes,” Ms. Johnson said in an interview last week, referring to Mr. Booker. “That, it seems, hasn’t been the case.”

Mr. Booker said his involvement in the lives of Sean, Anthony and Duwon was prompted by what he described as a missed opportunity to alter the destiny of Hassan Washington, a teenager who used to hang out in front of Mr. Booker’s apartment building during his days as a city councilman.

Although Mr. Booker invited Hassan out to dinner and the movies several times, he said he wished his involvement had been more consistent. In August, the mayor opened the newspaper to read that Hassan, 18, had been gunned down a few blocks from Mr. Booker’s home.

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Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker plays a late-night game of Risk in his office with Sean Bennett Laboo, left, and Anthony Jackson, center. Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

“It was the first time I wept as mayor,” he said.

After attending Hassan’s funeral, he headed over to the prosecutor’s office, where Mr. Booker confronted Sean and Duwon in a sterile conference room. “The streets chew up black men like you,” he said as they stared at the floor.

Over the last year, Mr. Booker has been alternately encouraged and frustrated by the boys and their progress. Although he is disappointed that Duwon dropped out of school and stopped showing up at weekend gatherings, he expressed relief last week when Lee Brown, a member of his security team who has kept tabs on Duwon, reported that he was regularly going to church and actively looking for a job.

By contrast, Sean, who turned 17 last week, and Anthony seem to savor their time with the mayor, although Anthony, an avid cartoonist whose life has been marked by a series of unhappy foster homes, shows up more reliably. “There are little signs of progress,” Mr. Booker said last week.

Once relentless in criticizing their tangled syntax and baggy trousers, Mr. Booker has come to realize that he cannot change the boys by hectoring them. “I realized that I just have to be there for them, whether they are good or bad, and let them know they have unconditional love,” he said.

At Applebee’s two Sundays ago, Mr. Booker did not appear to be bothered as Anthony unleashed kung-fu moves on a mayoral bodyguard. He held his tongue when he noticed much of Sean’s underwear glaringly visible above his drooping pants. But when Sean evaded questions about his plans and then proclaimed that he hoped to move out of his parents’ apartment soon to live on his own, the mayor turned parental.

He grabbed a napkin and proceeded to write down all the bare requirements of independent living — rent, utilities, car insurance and food — and came up with $24,000 in annual expenses. His question, “How are you going to make money?” was met with a shrug.

Duwon, who used to brag about riding around in stolen cars, lives with an aunt who provides minimal supervision. Until August, Anthony was living with Sean’s extended family in a crowded South Ward apartment.

Anthony was abandoned as a toddler by his mother and father, both of them lost to crack. Five years ago, Tawana Bennett Laboo, a distant relative of Sean’s mother who works as a housekeeper at University Hospital here, took in Anthony and his older sister. “It has been rough at times,” Ms. Laboo said after Anthony broke a new bed by jumping on it and then ran away from home to escape punishment. “Still, we try to treat him like he’s one of our own.”

Anthony sees matters differently. After repeated disappearances, sometimes for days at a time, he packed his bags in August and moved in with an aunt, claiming that the Laboos were forcing too many chores on him. “I don’t mind doing work; it was just going overboard,” he said.

Anthony recently pledged to study hard, stop running away and start making the mayor proud. Last year, he said, he endured the teasing of classmates who chided him for spending so much time with Mr. Booker. Sometimes their words would enrage him, and fists would fly.

Not anymore, he insisted. “One thing I’ve learned by hanging out with the mayor is it’s not all about fighting,” Anthony said. “I mean, look at Cory. He got where he is not because he can fight, but because he gots an education.”

Then, catching himself, he paused. “I mean because he has an education.”